Since 1995, revolutionary supporters of the Cuban Revolution in Britain have been organising solidarity through the Rock Around the Blockade (RATB) organisation. Its goal is to provide material support for Cuba, while demonstrating Cuban socialism's achievements as a way of building the socialist movement in Britain.
Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc — Cuba's key trading partners — Cuba and suffered severe shortages of essential medical products, industrial equipment and even food. This situation worsened the effects of the economic blockade enforced by the US government.
RATB was launched in 1995 by the Revolutionary Communist Group. "We approached the Union of Young Communists (UJC) in Cuba saying that we wanted to organise a campaign to donate material aid", RATB member Helen Yaffe told Green Left Weekly. "We were expecting requests for food and medicine. Instead they asked that we buy sound systems for young people's recreation. As a socialist government they were prioritising health and education and pouring all their resources into them. What they could not afford was the accessories, like music and leisure facilities, that they regard as the 'soul food' of young people.
Contrast
"It was a paradox because, at that time, the British government was passing the Criminal Justice Act, which made it illegal for young people to listen to music in the streets and gave police the powers to stop more than 10 young people from gathering without permission. Bizarrely, it criminalised music of more than 180 beats per minute. This authoritarian, anti-youth law is still in place. It provides a striking example of the contrast between the treatment of young people by a capitalist government and Cuba's socialist revolution."
RATB has provided four sound systems to the UJC, the latest being a mobile disco carried by a bus in the eastern province of Guantanamo. Another disco setup was given to the UJC in Trinidad de Cuba, Sancti Spiritus province. While there were already two discos in the city, these were for tourists who paid US dollars to gain entry. The UJC disco supplied by RATB charges cost a few pesos entry. More than half the population of the province is under 30.
Apart from sound systems, RATB has also donated computers, medical scanners and medicines, children's toys and educational equipment. Several solidarity exposure tours to Cuba for British youth have been organised. RATB tours Cuban speakers around Britain, the latest scheduled for the northern spring.
Boycott Bacardi
RATB's has launched a Boycott Bacardi campaign. Bacardi's "Cuban" rum advertisements romanticise (and whitewash) the sordid gambling and prostitution industries (and terrible poverty) which characterised Cuba before the revolution. The Bacardi family, having made their fortune from the exploitation of impoverished sugar workers in pre-revolutionary Cuba, fled the island shortly before the revolution of 1959.
The company, the biggest rum producer in the world, continues to exploit badly paid Third World labour. It funds violent counter-revolutionary Cuban exile groups in Miami and was involved in drafting sections of the US Helms-Burton Act which significantly tightened the US blockade against Cuba. The law was dubbed the "Helms-Bacardi Protection Act".
Boycott Bacardi activities range from street stalls to "improving" Bacardi advertising billboards. Bars are encouraged to stock Havana Club rum (which is produced in Cuba in a joint venture with French company Pernod) instead.
Recently, Britain's National Union of Students (NUS) accepted a three-year "sole supply" deal with Bacardi worth 𧼩,000. The deal prevents Havana Club rum, sales of which bring much-needed hard currency into the Cuban economy, being stocked in student bars in Britain.
RATB is campaigning to expose this. Yaffe told Green Left Weekly: "Not a single sabbatical officer of the NUS has replied to our letters registering our complaint and requesting information about whether they plan to renege on the deal with Bacardi. However, there has been interest and support expressed by students themselves, who are sick of their unions putting profit before ethics and their own students beliefs."
RATB is preparing to escalate Boycott Bacardi's campaign against the NUS-Bacardi deal in the new university year that begins at the end of September.
Against sectarianism
RATB argues against the sectarian attitudes towards Cuba of many British socialists. "RATB works with everyone who will work with us on the basis of supporting the revolution in Cuba", said Yaffe.
However, many British socialist organisations do not recognise Cuba as a revolutionary state. RATB member Ed Ralph responded to a speech by Socialist Workers Party (the parent party of the Australian International Socialist Organisation) leader Mike Gonzalez in which he pontificated on Cuba's "state capitalist" regime. Ralph reported that Gonzalez "regurgitated all the old lies about gays and people with HIV being persecuted ... He came up with new ones as well: apparently President Fidel Castro has secret bank accounts containing money from cocaine trafficking, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces directly run the tourism and prostitution industry."
In characterising Cuba as a dictatorship, Ralph said, Gonzalez "ignores the island's democratic system and denies the fact that elections take place". Ralph pointed out the hypocrisy of this denunciation of revolutionary Cuba when the SWP lionises the weak, opportunist left of the British Labour Party — the ruling party of imperialist Britain to which the SWP has traditionally given electoral support.
"RATB does not argue that Cuba is perfect, but that a socialist revolution is a process, and the Cuban people are working hard to create that", Yaffe said. For RATB activists, Yaffe explained, "The time to act is now. We must not let the imperialists ... destroy the Cuban Revolution. It is vital that it survives, not just for socialists and communists in the imperialist countries like Britain, but also for the oppressed peoples around the world for who Cuba is a beacon of hope and resistance to imperialism and the rampant charge of global capital."
For more information about Rock Around the Blockade, write to BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX, United Kingdom. The RATB web site and the Revolutionary Communist Group's newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! can accessed via <http://www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk>.
BY BEN COURTICE